Hey All!

It's been a very busy new year so far, and in the hustle of it all it's been difficult to find the time to write a few notes about my eminently blog-able trip to play in Anchorage, Alaska.  I invited the lovely Dawn Landes to play the show with me and contribute to this blog and since I am just back from my first recording session and Dawn has just finished up her new record, the time to put down a few thoughts has arrived.

Firstly, it is a long trip with a layover in Minneapolis, where to my surprise we were met by Jason Wilber, who I'd met before as the guitarist in John Prine's band.  Jason was heading up for some shows of his own in Alaska as well and it was great to see him again.  

We landed in Anchorage around three in the afternoon, the sun already fast going down behind the mountains.  Alaskan weather has none of the indeterminance of the East coast.  It is either one thing or another, but never both.  If it is snowing, it is snowing hard.  If it is cold, it is bone cold.  Alaskan weather, like its governor, does not play centrist politics.  The only doubtful thing on the horizon as we landed was Mount Redoubt, a volcano currently muttering away to itself about one hundred miles away from us in Anchorage and the suspense as to whether it would erupt during our stay was a source of constant speculation and conversation.

The airport was the first place we encountered wildlife.  Save for a small circle of birds that seemed content to be out of the cold and within the confines of the baggage terminal, most of it was taxidermy. We tried feeding a stuffed moose and I spent some time  communing with an albino beaver, but while nature is easy to commune with when packed with Styrofoam, the purifying effect of that communion seems to wear off much more quickly and we were soon anxious to get outside.

Mike, who was promoting the show, picked us up and regaled us with stories on the way into town.  Over the next couple of days, he and his business partner Bill would take us to see a pack of sled dogs and would advise on where to go to see as much nature as was possible within the confines of a day's drive.  

Sled dogs are not the kind of poofy, white smiling huskies that we see on brochures for Alaska.  To my surprise, sled dogs are a mixture of all kinds of dogs, the only real defining feature being a sinewy, electrified ranginess that is beautiful in its utility for the job of pulling a heavy sled and rider.  Watching the pack as the musher (the sled's driver) unhooked the dogs after a run, I realized how seldom we see a large group of dogs together.  There was definitely a pecking order, and a personality that defined where each dog would be most useful in its placement in harness.  The lead dog was followed by a kind of understudy lead-dog-in-training and from there back each animal was placed, like batters in a batting order or as Dawn pointed out, rowers in a crew boat, in accordance to where their personality and physique would be most useful to the team.  It was pretty fascinating.

I was surprised at the difference between my preconceptions of sled dogs and the reality, but the beards in Alaska were right up to my expectations.  Seriously, there are some hairy people in Alaska.  The hairiest by far were the customers at Alaska Feed and Seed and Title Wave, the great independent bookstore in town. Beards in both places were indistinguishable from one another; each looking as if they would be equally at home reading an Ivan Doig novel or checking a trap line behind a line of greyhound-pelted sled dogs.

Our show was at the University of Alaska Anchorage. The crowd, which was a mixture of all ages, was rowdy and fun.  Straining my eyes I was sure that the venue was a dry one, but by their giddiness one might have thought that pitchers were being passed around.  Dawn played a killer set and I had a great one as well.  Towards the end of the show Jason came out to play a few songs too and the night was a total blast.

Speaking of pitchers, a glass should be raised to Darwin's Theory and Humpy's, two great bars in town that seemed packed at all hours.  As I said before, it gets dark around 3 p.m. in January, and while that gave us about five hours to see mountains, rivers, glaciers and all variety of ungulates, it gave us even longer to see Humpy's, which Jason, Dawn and I repaired to after our concert.  Having recently become a resident of New York, it was also great to feel the familiar friendliness of people all over town.  Anchorage is big –  over 200,000 people – and yet, in the early dark of January nights, one and all seem to treat you as if you will meet each other again if you haven't already, so there is a feeling of familiarity based upon not just the past, but also the future.  "I don’t know you," the philosophy seems to go, "but I will."  In Darwin's Theory we were offered a piece of pizza by a guy sitting at the bar.  In Humpy's we talked for a while with the keyboard player and singer in a local (awesome) funk band.  

The next day, Dawn and I drove to Girdwood, a small town on what is mysteriously and J.R.R Tolkien-y named the Turnagin Arm of the Cook Inlet, about forty miles from Anchorage.  The drive was spectacular and along the way we saw an ice climber clomp across the road in crampons and begin to climb up a wall of solid ice above the narrow highway.  In Girdwood, we took a gondola up to the top of a ski mountain and watched as mortals courted mortality on some of the steepest slopes I've ever seen.  I decided that the better part of valor was hot chocolate.  From there, we got back hot on the trail of more ungulates and found our way to a wildlife preserve where we communed with living, protected animals that had been rescued from all over Alaska.  Despite a fence, we were nearly (very nearly) gored by an elk, who himself seemed to have decided that the better part of valor was goring the guy with the video camera.

It was an amazing, beautiful and too-short trip, and a return is being planned for the summer time for some more gigs in the most beautiful place in America.  I sincerely hope that Mount Redoubt can hold off on its eruption til then.

Thank you to everyone who made this show such a great success!




A VALENTINE TO ALASKA
by dawn Landes

Alaska! with your constant threat of ash
Your snow and your dogs, your playful giftshop ladies
Lets mush Alaska! Gi Haw! Gi!
You have funny radio personalities, coining new words like Bald-Ear and Snash.
You're silly, Alaska, even your gays are silly.
Reciting cruel opera reviews from the New York Times.
Verbatim!
over dinner
Your salmon made me cry, Alaska.
Steeped in purple onions and wasabi, even your menus made me feel something.
All your workers seem to love their work.
Your bookstores confuse and overwhelm me. Gnostics tucked in with politicians. Missing biography sections. Plastic musical spoons and jingle bells for bears.
Alaska, your Lost Boys are everywhere.
Dancing in the aisles of bookstores and gas stations.
In another frame they could be hip hop stars.
Your morning darkness is blue and bright. A beach sky through 3-D glasses.
A valentine for you, Alaska, cut in the shape of a city trail.
Last night I ran on your treadmills and watched your wolves dance on the TV.
They looked a lot like the dancing wolves I'd seen years before, in a crowded movie theater in Indiana. But yours were smaller, your wolves, and your love scenes sweeter.




Alaska winter tour from Fun Machine on Vimeo.